Marsupials

Today we went early to the market in Hobart and then we decided to go see a wildlife refuge that heals wounded animals.  They also have a number of breed in captivity kangaroos that are so docile you can feed them.  The refuge does a great job of rescuing many of the orphaned wombats or tasmanian devils whose Mom was killed on the roads.  You see too many road kill here. It’s because the are mainly nocturnal and well it’s dangerous out there.
I love the way the kangaroos move without making a sound and how graceful they are when hopping. Their paws are very strange, they have evolved in a world apart.
The Échidné are a type of ant eater mixed with a porcupine or hedgehog.  They lay eggs like the Platypus.  They are very cute and have some unusual sexual behavior.  But then all marsupials have strange breeding practices. Kangaroo joeys sit right side up in the pouch but wombats are upside down.  Some lay eggs some don’t, what a mystery it must have been to the first explorers.  In any case the Echnids kind of waddle along.



This photo of a kangaroo shows how he is so beautifully balanced and porportioned.
Yves in conférence with the kangaroos.
This wombat was roused from his sleep by a refuge worker.  They are digging animals and very fast but so cuddly. They are very smart and if threatened can crawl into there hole and block the entrance with their butt which is a thick callous that cannot be felt if bitten.  Go figure.
2 frogmouthed owls waking up.
I don’t know what this goose with the red socks is called. I’ll have to look that up.

This poor Tasmanian devil is suffering from cateracts and can hardly see. 80 percent of Devils have died from a cancer that they are very susceptible to and this is in the last 10 years.  The young are deprived of good nourishment when the mother is sick and that is why many of the offspring are smaller than usual or have cateracts.  They are sweet animals but have sharp teeth and eat carrion.  They sweat through their ears that is why they are red.


This refuge is working expressly in the next few year on trying to save the devil.  It is called a devil because the noise it makes at night was thought to be the devil’s sound by the early settlers.


The Tasmanian tiger had been extinct since 1939 when the last one died in a zoo.  They had thought it was a male but at its death they found out it was a female and maybe they could have bred it but too late, she gone.
 

Comments

  1. TravelgirlfranceMarch 23, 2023 at 2:16 PM

    Love Yves and the kangaroos.

    ReplyDelete
  2. cashman1900March 28, 2023 at 12:40 PM

    I saw a film recently called “the hunter”. It was about the Tasmanian tiger and it’s extinction. I did not like the film much but it looked great

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Palms and the Empty Quarter

Image
As I said in the end of this post, we left the high mountains (the highest in Oman 3000 meters) to stay in the desert. We stopped in a village called, Misfat al Abriyyin.  It is a very old town with thousands of date palm irrigated by a gushing spring.  We had some coffee (arabica) and delicious dates.  The winding narrow streets reminded me of some villages on the french coast near us.   There were signs about the pest, the red palm beetle that is destroying soothe date palms and this is a real disaster when it is the only product you export. On the way to our next stop I was looking at the many minarets and admiring the variety of styles. Sunset of our first night on the dunes. I thought of Maria Muldar’s song “Midnight at the oasis”.  The sand was sand blasting because the wind was up. I do understand the wearing of veils for wind and sun only if you want to. A view from near the bottom of the dune. I couldn’t make it to the top. It was like walking on ball b...
Read more

Taj and Baby Taj

Image
Architecture must be experienced so here is entry to the Taj Mahal in the morning. must be experienced I have again no way of changing the sequence of these photos without losing most of them. This is one of the towers at the corner of the Taj Mahal. It’s really incredible that they are so perfectly pristine after all these years.  It is a beautiful story. She Mumtaz Mahal was a childhood friend of Shah Jahan and they were about the same age. She gave him 14 children and died at the age of 38. If you do the math, most of her married life she was pregnant but then only 6 of her children survived.  Shah Jahan was devastated at her death after the 14 th child and made this mausoleum to her.  He later in life wanted to make a black Taj across the river for himself but his 3rd son wasn’t having it and cut off his two elder brothers heads and imprisoned his father Shah Jahan.  Aurangzeb became the new emporeur.  So goes it. Here below is a detail of the beautiful marb...
Read more

Jaipur, the pink city

Image
 I’ve always wanted to see the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, astronomical instruments to view celestial events.  But I didn’t realize the palaces here were so beautiful and extensive.  The fort above is perched on a hill with a fortress wall that surrounds it a little like a “Great wall of China”.  The city of Jaipur is called the “Pink City” because most of it was painted pink by à mataraja of the late 19th cen.  To get here we had to suffer the Indian highways which are calculated chaos.  Holy cows directing traffic , tuc tucs at every angle, a mess.  The lines on the road don’t mean anything the horn rules.  They don’t use their rear view mirrors because they are so busy looking at what’s happening in front of them so they all have signs on the back “blow horn” so they know you are in back of them. It seems the cows get high on the exhaust of cars that’s why they hang out near highways. We stopped along the way at a baoli or step well. I met these t...
Read more